Is the Twice-Divorced Newt Gingrich Converting to Catholicism for a 2012 Run?

By Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast. Posted March 31, 2009.

That same year, a group of Hudson’s closest conservative Catholic allies hosted a symposium, called The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics, in which they questioned the very legitimacy of American democracy. One speaker, Princeton professor Robert George, advocated mass civil disobedience to resist federal court decisions protecting reproductive and gay rights. The most influential member of the religious right’s evangelical wing, James Dobson, endorsed these Catholics’ calls for rebellion.

The movement’s apocalyptic mood resonated inside the halls of Congress, where Gingrich advanced impeaching Clinton as his party’s unifying theme ahead of midterm elections in 1998. But away from the limelight of the press, Gingrich was involved in an extramarital affair with Bisek, a young blond Capitol Hill staffer 23 years his junior who he had arranged to be put on the House Republicans' payroll. The wild mood swings that had always characterized Gingrich’s behavior intensified as the president strengthened his position against the impeachment tribunal. Staffers discovered the Speaker crying at his desk. In the end, Gingrich’s strategy backfired in the 1998 midterm elections, resulting in the worst defeat in 64 years for a party that did not control the White House. House Republicans intimately aware of his affair with Bisek were involved in forcing Gingrich to resign from Congress so they could push on to their apocalyptic impeachment of Clinton without worrying about Gingrich’s exposure.

Gingrich promptly turned to matters of the heart, dumping his second wife, Marianne Ginther. He announced his intention to divorce her just as he had done with his first wife, Jackie Battley—while she was lying in a hospital bed, immobilized after a major medical procedure. (Battley was recovering from cancer surgery; Ginther’s appendix had ruptured.) He never bothered to tell his wife in person that he was leaving her for another woman. He called her on the phone, delivered the news, and hung up.

While Gingrich bided his time in the political wilderness, Hudson brought the Catholic right to the peak of its influence during George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign for re-election against the Catholic Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry. A confidant of Karl Rove, Hudson became Bush’s Catholic point man, enlisting a network of antiabortion bishops to threaten their congregants with excommunication if they voted for Kerry. Meanwhile, Hudson intimidated Catholic Democrats from inside the church, persuading the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to fire a low-level employee, Ono Ekeh, for hosting a “Catholics for Kerry” event. ("If you're going to play in the sandbox," Hudson told a reporter, “then you have to take the consequences of your public utterances and your public actions.”) Hudson’s crusade worked. In 2000, Bush won 46 percent of the Catholic vote; in 2004 he carried 52 percent—a decisive swing.

But at the height of the campaign, Hudson’s own past came back to haunt him when journalist Joe Feuerherd published a lengthy story in the National Catholic Reporter about Poppas’ sexual-harassment lawsuit. Hudson responded in a column on the Web site of the National Review, casting himself as a victim of “personal attacks” intended to undermine his conservative activism, but added, “No one regrets my past mistakes more than I do.” He quit the Bush campaign soon after, and then resigned from Crisis, which is now defunct. “Every single Catholic who has ever lived has violated church doctrine,” Hudson told me. “That’s called sin. That’s my situation too—it’s a matter of public record.”

With Bush back in the White House, Gingrich ignited his comeback campaign. He focused his efforts most intensely on reaching out to the religious right, beginning with a March 2007 phone call to the country’s third most popular radio show, Focus on the Family, hosted by Dobson. A producer promptly transferred Gingrich to a studio line, and the public confession he and Dobson had planned a month earlier began.

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Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing fellow at The Nation Institute, whose book, Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books), is forthcoming in Spring 2009. Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.

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